I was recently invited by the University of Luxembourg as a keynote speaker at an International Conference, ‘Gender Variations in Educational Success: Searching for Causes’. It quickly became apparent that boys’ achievement with respect to girls’ is an international, hot topic. National and political concerns in Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg have created a mass of research dominated by multivariate analysis and structural equation modelling. Scholars from these countries drew heavily on data available from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to search for the ‘causes’ of boys’ underachievement. Alongside PISA data they used national public examination and test scores, psycho metric measures of cognitive competencies in, for example, reading, mathematics and problem solving, scales of well-being and data gathered from questionnaires designed by researchers to capture, for example young people’s motivations to learn. Read the full story

Carol’s keynote opened the conference by taking stock of girls and women’s position in education for “without the past we can’t understand the present”. She began by troubling the idea of progress for in the history of girls education, things do not only get better. Read the full story

This month the UK newspapers have been awash with stories about the (supposedly) ever-decreasing ‘gender gap’. Indeed, several key reports relating to equalities issues have been released in the past month, all of which have been discussed at great length in the British media. Of greatest international significance, perhaps, have been the reports surrounding the progress made against the millennium development goals (a set of goals which were proposed by world leaders back in the year 2000 and were revisited last month as these leaders returned to New York for the UN summit, Singer 2010). Although a number of scholars have pointed to the fact that the success of achieving these goals has largely been attributable to moving the goalposts, the positive news reported last week was that gender parity in education was being achieved and in ways which had substantial effects upon the ability to reach other goals (e.g. infant mortality rates). Read the full story

Once more, the annual hysteria around exam results is upon us in the UK, and as journalist Lucy Tobin puts it the gender debate that has been simmering for the last few years is set to ignite. Read the full story